By Adam Ferguson

It has been observed that as much, if not more, can be learned from failure as from success. A few weeks ago, back when I was still an academic, I would have felt the need for a citation here, but now I'll simply appeal to common experience.

We all know it's true -- failures are often very informative, particularly if you can trace the root causes of the failure. In that spirit, I offer the story of my long academic job search. It was hard work, it was bruising, and it was entirely unproductive, except insofar as you believe that all lived experiences are enriching. Which I generally do, with the exception of my ninth-grade biology class. That was a total loss.

First, the basics. I defended my Ph.D. in 2005 at a top-tier research university in the Northeast. My department was a sprawling, interdisciplinary behemoth, essentially a policy school, with professors drawn from across the social sciences -- economics, sociology, education, political science, and the like.

"Aha," you probably think. "It was an interdisciplinary doctorate. No wonder he failed." Well. Yeah. Maybe. But others in my program did just fine.

I started my job search in 2004 while still in the midst of data analysis for my dissertation, looking ahead to a June defense. I had my first experience talking to potential academic employers at the national conference that fall. It was enough to make me a little nervous.

I had always thought "glazed eyes" was a figure of speech. However, I was talking about my dissertation to the dean of a relevant department at the University of Chicago, and I saw his eyes actually glaze over. It seemed to me that his eyes -- previously a lively blue -- actually turned to glass as I was talking.

"Aha," you think. "He doesn't know how to make his topic interesting."

Perhaps. At that point, I still thought that it was important to present my entire research proposal, albeit in abbreviated form, without making any attempt to tailor the research to the audience. However, then and now, I think it was something more than simply not properly framing my research.

The truth was that my topic placed me in the farthest sociological reaches of my interdisciplinary department. Frame it or reframe it, my dissertation topic was going to marginalize me in my chosen field.

I applied for about 10 jobs that first year, growing increasingly desperate as the year progressed and I realized that being a student in a top-tier university was not enough to ensure an offer from even a second- or third-tier university. The people doing the hiring were looking for expertise in certain areas where I had none.

The result, finally, was that I scrounged together a year of research support at my home university, courtesy of professors there who believed my work was important and timely. It looked like salvation -- I would have a year to work on publishing and to do a new, improved job search.

That was the problem, I concluded. I hadn't applied to enough departments and I hadn't applied to the right ones. I had office mates who had applied to 60 or 80 institutions, and some of them still hadn't found a position. I just needed to do a more comprehensive job search. (Mind you, those colleagues were from more unified disciplines where the marginal cost of an additional application was close to zero. They simply changed the heading of each letter and sent it out, while I found myself rewriting each cover letter more or less from scratch.)

My experience on the market the next year was no better. If anything it was worse. At least the first year of my search I had a dissertation to work on; I could make progress on that even if the job search went nowhere.

This second year, my dissertation was complete. I seemed to be largely spinning my wheels in my research, turning my dissertation into papers, and extending my research to confirm more robustly what I already knew. I sent out 24 applications, targeting an array of positions in public-policy departments, business schools, and communication programs. To no avail. I got one phone interview in January, and that was that.

"Aha," you think. "He was applying to too many kinds of programs. He doesn't know what kind of academic he is -- how could his potential employer?"

Good points. You're pretty smart.

Graduation last spring was not as fun as it could have been for me. I swapped job-search stories with my fellow grads and realized that their stories all had happy endings. Well, sort of happy, anyway. I heard comments like:

• "And that was when I realized Albuquerque was the place for me. It has great weather, and it's only a seven-hour drive to Denver."

• "Omaha isn't as bad as you think."

• "I like the cold. I'm just worried about being attacked by bears on the way to class."

• "My wife is ethnically Chinese, so living in Singapore will be good for her and the kids."

Or, the most sad:

• "Living 2,000 miles from my wife is very difficult. But it won't be forever."

I felt like a failure admitting I hadn't found an academic job. I was a failure. I hadn't even gotten an interview.

So why did I fail? Let's quickly address what I (back when I was an academic) would have called alternate hypotheses:

It wasn't that my referees were writing me lackluster recommendations. I happened to have some personal connections in the target departments, and I was assured by people I trust that my referees had written me good letters. But they were, to varying extents, writing those letters to departments outside of their fields.

It wasn't due to any intrinsic weakness in my research or my writing. My dissertation won several awards (one from my department, one from a fairly high-profile association that studies exactly the kinds of issues upon which my dissertation focused.)

As far as I can tell, the truth is simply that I wasn't the right kind of academic for any of the openings that I saw. My work didn't cleanly fit into any discipline. Even allegedly interdisciplinary departments have departmental needs and standards that I didn't meet.

What do I suggest to other doctoral students who fear they may be writing peripheral dissertations? One answer, of course, is to publish. Pick a discipline, as early as possible, and publish in that discipline's journals. All doubts in a job committee's collective mind will be washed away by the clear, delicious flood of publications with your name on them.

But I'm not sure that's the answer for me. I like straddling boundaries, drawing from more than one discipline's literature. I like answering questions and moving on to new topics. All of that makes it hard to publish in a single discipline's journals.

One month after graduation, I got an interview at a large research university in the Northeast. I interviewed for, and got an offer of, a one-year teaching position. In the end, I said no. Part of it was timing -- it was very late in the academic cycle, and my wife and I had made alternate arrangements in a distant city. I like teaching, but I knew that what would get me additional academic jobs was research, for which the one-year job would have left me no time.

The other part was a more fundamental decision, though. I have decided to be a nonacademic for a while, perhaps just long enough to remember what drew me into academe in the first place. And so I have begun a new, nonacademic job search. Stay tuned.